Chronotis: Card Fighting System Concepts and Game Design Part 2

I apologize for being late this week as this has been a very hectic week but I’m here as promised to talk a bit more about the game design of Chronotis card fighting system! This time, i actually want to talk specifically about the battle system and some of the unique aspects of it vs other card games.

In most card games digital card games, the active players turn is the turn in which all actions are performed outside of automatic effects the reactive player may have access to. You cannot perform turn actions on as the reactive player thus it means that each of your counter play responses is based on preemptive play rather than true reactive play. While part of this holds true for Chronotis, it does not hold true for combat!

In Chronotis, the active player does have a phase in which they are allowed to perform turn actions that they can only use during their turn. But during combat, all gloves are off! During combat in this game, you can actually steal your opponents turn and gain a decisive advantage on them! The active player is the player who will declare the first attack for the turn, this rule is always true. The reactive player however is capable of taking that players turn through the use of various mechanics:

Override: Override is a mechanic similar to that of “counter spell”. Something that you might be familiar with if you played MTG or Yu-gi-oh with its trap cards. Override allow you to cancel and destroy (crush is the game term) your opponent’s attack and become the attacking player using the card you overrode your opponent’s attack with. As powerful as these cards are, there are some downsides of course. You are only allowed to have 6 total overrides in your deck and overrides do have a cost. You have to pay 1 [drive] (or discard one card from your hand), in order to play them so if your opponent has a counter for your override, you could be down 2 cards and leaving yourself wide open to being hit or worse, knocked down.

Counter: Counter allows you to become the attacking player after you successfully guard an attack. Unlike overrides, there are no limit to the amount of counter cards you can have in your deck.

Although override and counter are similar in nature, they are very different. Override will reset the time intervals to the new attacking battle card. So in other words, if your opponent used an attack that has 4 time span and your override has 1 time span, their card is crushed and your card becomes the attacking card, leaving 6 time span remaining for use. Counter doesn’t crush the battle card, it simply is used after you guard an attack. In theory, you could have a turn where both players constantly fight for control of combat! (This has happened countless times in testing lol)

Figuring out a way to properly make these mechanics work was quite the challenge but I am very happy with the way they came out! They create an incredibly different and dynamic feel that I think is pretty unique to this game. If you are interested in learning more about the game or even helping us with playtesting, join our discord server here: https://discord.gg/rH6shz You can get all of the latest updates regarding the game there! Looking forward to seeing you there! Until next time!